The Fertility Brain Drain

From medieval monasteries to Silicon Valley — why societies keep converting their brightest people into childless institutional servants

There are few smarter commentators on the fertility crisis than Alice Evans, and here she is discussing it with one of my very talented former students, the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch.

Yet throughout history, societies have shifted some of their brightest people opt out of the baby-making business – with remarkable consistency across cultures that had no contact with one another.

Medieval Europe lured them into monasteries and convents, creating vast networks of celibate scholars and agricultural innovators. Tibet, before Chinese intervention in 1950, had almost a quarter of all adult males behind monastery walls, running what was, in effect, a parallel state apparatus.

Now we are seeing the same across the developed world. South Korea today has a fertility rate of 0.72 – the lowest peacetime figure ever recorded – because its most educated citizens simply aren’t forming families.

This is not societal breakdown, though it’s often mistaken for one. It is optimisation of a particularly ruthless sort. When the expected social return from human capital exceeds that from additional offspring, societies systematically swap genes for knowledge. The logic is as elegant as it is unsentimental: better fewer, more capable people than more, less capable ones.

The question isn’t whether this trade-off makes sense – it demonstrably does, under certain conditions – but whether we’ve built the institutional architecture to capture its benefits whilst managing its costs.